AI Acceleration insights
AI Opportunity: Your Data-Driven Guide to AI Adoption Across Your Application Portfolio

With the launch of AI Acceleration insights – and particularly the AI Opportunity indicator – that finally changes. AI Opportunity is a new feature included in the Complete Insights edition that gives portfolio managers, architects, and technology leaders a clear, objective, data-driven view of where AI can realistically make an impact, and where it reasonably can’t yet. By combining automated source code scanning with structured survey-based insights, AI Opportunity scores every application in your portfolio, maps it to a concrete strategic segment, and detects a list of possible AI services or LLMs an application can take advantage of. The result is less guesswork, faster decisions, and AI investments that land where they matter most.

How AI Opportunity Works

AI Opportunity introduces a dedicated AI Opportunity score for each application in your portfolio, ranging from 0 to 100. This score is calculated from two complementary sources:

Code Scan Score

The code scan score is computed automatically as part of CAST Highlight’s standard analysis. During each scan, Highlight detects deterministic code patterns that signal readiness or suitability for AI and LLM integration. Today, 29 patterns are supported across Java, Python, .NET, VB/VB.NET, JavaScript, and TypeScript.

Each detected pattern carries a predefined weight based on its relevance as an AI use case indicator. The scoring is cumulative and positive-only: patterns that signal strong AI potential add points, while the absence of a pattern does not penalize the score. This keeps the score focused on what’s possible – the opportunity – not what’s missing.

Declared Insights Score (Survey)

The declared insights score captures the organizational, business, and architectural context that code alone can’t reveal. For each application, users answer a short survey covering dimensions such as:

• Does the application already use AI/ML capabilities?
• How do users primarily interact with it?
• How complex is the application’s business logic?
• What is its technical architecture?
• How suitable are its processes for automation or augmentation?
• What best describes the data it uses?

Each question carries weighted answer options, and responses contribute a predefined number of points to the total score. The final declared insights score reflects the broader opportunity for AI enablement within the application’s context.

Combined Score

The final AI Opportunity score is the average of the two:

AI Opportunity = (Code Scan Score + Declared Insights Score) / 2

This blended approach ensures the score reflects both what’s observable in the codebase and what’s known about the application’s business environment.

Portfolio Advisor for AI Adoption

Once scores are calculated across your portfolio, CAST Highlight surfaces them in a dedicated Portfolio Advisor for AI Adoption dashboard. This is where the feature really comes into its own.

The dashboard intersects each application’s AI Opportunity score with its Business Impact score — already available in Highlight — to automatically segment your entire portfolio into four strategic quadrants:

This segmentation gives you an immediate, portfolio-wide view of your AI strategy — without manually reviewing each application. Applications that are both technically ready and business-critical rise to the top as Strategic Priorities. Applications with strong AI potential but lower criticality appear as Quick Wins, making them ideal for proofs of concept.

Exploring AI Opportunity Patterns

Beyond the strategic quadrant view, the portfolio dashboard includes a dedicated AI Opportunity Patterns view. This aggregates the code patterns detected across all applications, letting you quickly see which patterns appear most frequently and across which technologies.

This cross-portfolio visibility is especially useful for platform and architecture teams: if a high-value pattern shows up in dozens of applications, it’s a strong signal to build shared enablement rather than tackling each application in isolation.

Viewing AI Service Recommendations

CAST Highlight doesn’t just score your applications, it translates scores into actionable AI service recommendations. At both the portfolio and application level, Highlight identifies which AI services or large language models (LLMs) each application is best suited to leverage, grouped by platform.

CAST Highlight includes recommendations for AWS, Anthropic, and OpenAI, and more to come. This gives teams a concrete starting point for technology selection, rather than evaluating the AI services landscape from scratch for every initiative.

Drilling Into Individual Applications

For each application, a dedicated view provides:

• AI Opportunity & Business Impact scores: see the code scan score and declared insights score side by side, along with the combined score
• Declared Insights: a summary of the survey responses that informed the score, giving reviewers full transparency into how the score was derived
• Code-level AI Patterns: a detailed list of the specific patterns detected in that application’s codebase, with sizing to understand how prevalent each pattern is
• AI Service Recommendations: specific services and LLMs recommended for that application, based on its combined score and detected patterns

This application-level detail is key for engineering leads and architects who need to move from strategy to execution. Rather than starting with a blank page, they can see exactly which patterns in the codebase are creating the opportunity, and which AI services are the best match.

Start Making Smarter AI Investment Decisions

AI adoption is accelerating — but the organizations that will lead are those that invest with precision. The AI Opportunity feature in CAST Highlight gives you the objective, data-driven foundation to do exactly that: know which applications are truly ready for AI, which ones need groundwork first, and where to focus your energy for the fastest return.

Whether you’re building an enterprise AI strategy, evaluating modernization priorities, or looking for quick wins to demonstrate value, AI Opportunity gives every stakeholder — from CIO to engineering lead — a shared, evidence-based view of the path forward.

For more information about CAST Highlight, visit castsoftware.com/highlight